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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Dell Latitude Notebook Touchpad Disable

A back-to-my-roots post this time and another Dell laptop no less. This time it's a Dell Latitude D830 and its touchpad that is the problem. The problem is not how to get it to work, but how to turn the damn thing off so I can type normally. Without knowingly touching it, my cursor sometimes jumps up a line or two and my typing gets inserted where it was not meant to be.

You'd think it'd be easy right? Just go into the Control Panel, and under Mouse find the driver panel and disable it. Well, it would be except that this model laptop is circa 2007, pre-Windows 7, and they never updated the driver. OK, option 2 was to go into the BIOS settings and disable it there. No luck. There is a place to disable it, but it only applies to the POST. Gaack!

Finally, I ran across a suggestion to use the Touchpad driver for a Latitude 6400 and voilá, after install (as Administrator) the mouse driver panel has a touchpad tab from which you can customize the things 8 ways to Sunday. Problem solved.

I've been trying to get this to work under Windows 8 but to no avail. Is anyone able to get this touchpad to work under Windows 8? So far all drivers result in erratic behavior in the pointer movement.

Thanks for the post. This was driving me crazy. It is insane that they "updated" this so that you can't access any control of the mouse pad. It is so sensative that you can't type without the cursor jumping all over the place when you accidentally touch the pad.